I'll be speaking on a plenary panel with Dana Luciano and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson at the upcoming Capacious affect theory conference August 8-11 in Lancaster, PA, where I'll also be presenting the graduate student workshop "Plasticity and the Biopolitics of Affect."

I'll be presenting on my research practices into biopolitics before the state on Sept. 28 (2pm) at Columbia University's Art & Architecture Forum, and The Biopolitics of Feeling on Nov. 1 at Yale University's Americanist Colloquium in the English Department. I'm also speaking at the 2018 Rutgers Women's and Gender Studies graduate student conference Bodies of Power/ Theory in the Flesh on October 5. Looking forward to meeting new folks!

Biopolitics as an analytic has borne an increasingly influential role in a number of fields and areas of inquiry central to American studies. Contemporary scholarship in Black, critical ethnic, and gender and sexuality studies—to name only a few—has taken biopower as a point of departure to illuminate how hierarchies of differential value and disposability have shaped life in the Americas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, Foucault’s and Agamben’s theoretical framework out of which so many studies of biopower have grown has been famously inattentive to slavery, colonialism, empire, and settler expansionism. Many of the key concepts and questions of biopolitical inquiry (security, population, state racism, the management of life and death, necropolitics, political and reproductive economy, etc.) were developed out of and implemented within slavery and other colonial economies, as scholars such as Mbembe have illuminated. Key gaps thus persist in our knowledge: How did biopolitics unfurl its deadly calculations of the relative value of life in the context of the early American colonies and later the United States? What can biopolitical frames offer early American studies and vice versa? Our purpose is both to to critically engage the history of the biopolitical in the period before 1900 and to reframe early American studies in relation to biopolitics.

This special issue underscores the increasing relevance of biopolitics to current scholarly debates within early American studies and offers crucial correctives to dominant analyses of biopower. It aims to add new insight to ongoing conversations in early American studies, including questions about the shifting strategies of colonial and state-based governance at the level of the parish, the city, the frontier, and the nation; the changing relationship between waged and unfree labor, especially in the context of racial capitalism and the assumed disposability of Black, Asian, and indigenous life; the increasing centrality of the human sciences to understandings of difference and emergent nationalisms; the understanding of the Human and the commons that underpins liberal democracy; and the changing relationships of religion, secularism, and postsecularism to settler colonialism, empire, and territory control. Conversely, exploring the role of religion, in particular—the governing structure of imperial projects—helps displace the state as the privileged actor of biopower. Highlighting the range of tactics deployed by expansionist empires in the Americas opens new vantages onto the integral relationship between settler colonialism and biopolitical control. Furthermore, analyzing how sex difference, gender, and sexuality emerged in relation to racial formations provides urgently needed intersectional responses to Foucault’s theory of state racism.

Proposed essays may consider, among other topics:

Comparative slavery studies

Race science, public health, medicine, and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technologies to produce and manage bodily difference

Resistance of individuals and populations marked disposable

Networks of economic, medical, scientific, religious contact throughout North America, the Caribbean, and Central and South America

Management of reproduction and fertility among free and unfree populations

Capitalism, industrialization, and the management of multispecies populations and ecologies

Intertwined technologies of individual discipline and population regulation, such as the prison, school, slave ship, domestic home, or plantation

Sustainability, conservation, and the uneven origins of anthropogenic change

The violences of settler colonialism and indigenous removal campaigns

Biopower and its relation to aesthetic and cultural modes, genres, and forms

Essays of up to 10,000 words are due August 1, 2018. Authors must address the guest editors and clearly indicate in a cover letter that the submission is intended for the 2019 special issue. Information about American Quarterly and submission guidelines can be found at www.americanquarterly.org.

Join me at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis on Thursday, February 15 for a workshop and book party to launch The Biopolitics of Feeling. Featuring Banu Subramaniam, Peter Coviello, and Che Gossett. 6pm.

My essay "The Microbial Self: Sensation and Sympoiesis" will be available in the Summer 2018 (5.3) issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. This special issue on Sensation is edited by Erica Fretwell. My essay explores the rise of what I am calling the “microbial self,” a notion of personhood in which the subject and its self-constituting sensations and affective states emerge within a spiral of interspecies interdependence. The microbial self destabilizes dominant models of liberal selfhood, which conceive of the isolated nervous system and its capacities for sensation as the basis for claims to political rights.

I am excited to announce that I will be editing a special issue of American Quarterlyon "Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas," along with Greta LaFleur. The CFP will circulate this fall, with essays due August 1, 2018. The issue will launch in fall of 2019. Watch this space for more info!

In September of 2017, I will begin an External Faculty Fellowship at Stanford Humanities Center to work on my next book, Gender Studies After Gender. The book draws on feminist science studies, evolutionary biology, and transgender theory to investigate the meanings of gender in light of the material turn. Gender Studies After Gender rethinks the sex/gender distinction to consider how both sex and gender denote processes of dynamic exchange between bodies and their environments.